Umbra 3.4 released today

April 15, 2016

Helsinki, Finland – April 15th – Umbra released an major update today for their visibility solution product Umbra 3. It is the biggest update since the initial launch of the original product, as it features completely rewritten computation pipeline, improved culling at a distance and backwards compatibility with Umbra 3.3.

The Umbra 3 Visibility Solution improves development workflow by enabling both rapid content iteration as well as the creation of more detailed graphics. The software automatically generates occlusion data from “polygon soup”, enabling artists to use their valuable time on creating graphically impressive game worlds.

The focus of the 3.4 update is making the visibility data computation more robust, faster and have it produce higher quality occlusion data. The migration for existing users is almost transparent as the public APIs have been kept intact and the modifications to the Umbra runtime are minor.

The most exciting quality improvement is a completely new approach for generating the data used for culling at a distance. Users are now able to scale the parameters in a way which means that less occlusion is sacrificed when producing coarser versions of the data. This directly translates to fewer objects to render and reduces the need for manually fine-tuning the scene geometry for optimal occlusion.

The computation pipeline was completely rewritten. Not only does this result in better quality output data, but also in better parallelization and distribution of work, as well as even better incremental computation. Ultimately, this means faster data generation. Because of all the rewriting, the development team now has a new solid foundation to work on for further improvements. This is only a beginning for Umbra 3.4 which will keep on improving based on the users needs.

The upgrade is downloadable for Umbra 3.3 users free of charge. It’s also available for a free evaluation on all major platforms.

Umbra has been powering up graphics performance in more than 125 video games during the last 10 years. Clients include internationally renowned game studios that have produced commercially successful AAA productions such as Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Batman Arkham Knight, Quantum Break, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Destiny. Umbra is a Helsinki based company that was founded in 2006 by its current owners. Today the company employs a team of specialists working in Finland, United States, Korea, China and Japan.